Recent content by Wild_Bill_Kelso

Quitting this forum

Great pics

yep, with the window closed ;)

Both sides ceded some land based on the Yalta treaty, but the Anglo-Americans certainly had control of regions such as the Belgian border, and the Swiss border. I myself was stationed there during the Cold War :)

One of my favorite WW2 aviation stories is the absolutely insane raid by TB-3 with I-16 parasite fighers, along with some Pe-2s, against the King Carol I bridge near Ploesti. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zveno_project#Operational_history

I think the Axis powers in general may have really dropped the ball by not committing more assets to North Africa much earlier. Instead of - or at least before- say, conquering Yugoslavia and Greece.. (although those do go together with taking Egypt). Maybe a more focused and less wide invasion...

The Soviets only conquered the eastern half of Germany though, let's keep in mind.

Ok but let me play devil's advocate here a bit. First, there is some oil drilling going on near Cairo, right? So that is something right there. If there is already a refinery in Haifa that can be repaired too. Second, though those distances are indeed very long, and the Axis were limited in...

I agree it took a (rather bafflingly) long time to get the Tu-2 into action in large numbers. They did have some flying fairly early, more or less as operational testing units, but I never fully understood why it took so long for the type to reach large scale production, which in fact it never...

We can debate the victory claims totals, and many will (some people will deny that the Soviets shot down any German planes!) but one thing is irrefutable - that guys like Pokryshkin survived multiple years on the front line, fighting against the supposedly invincible uber-men of the Luftwaffe...

How long would it take to expand whatever was going in Iraq and Egypt? I.e. trying to assess the Axis chances of conquest in the Middle East.

I never said it was a good idea lol - it was just the first thing they came up with in the midst of the crisis during the lead up to Second El Alamein. The Allies had rather suddenly become very efficient at sinking cargo ships, destroying docks, destroying trucks, and generally wiping out the...

But there was some oil production in Persia, and they had struck oil in Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain in the 1930s. ARAMCO was established in 1943.

Fuel used by ships varies a great deal by the size and weight of a ship. Barges on rivers, and certain classes of merchant shipping are very cheap to operate, but warships not so much. Bunker fuel is also much cheaper (much less processed) than aviation fuel, particularly of the type used by WW2...

The Italians were clearly very, very smart. They had, and continue to have, some of the most skilled and creative designers in the world. And their soldiers were just as brave as any other. They suffered from having been under fascist leadership ten years longer than Germany had, since the...